Subject Guides
How To: Bloomberg Terminal: The Keyboard
Information about the Bloomberg database and terminal.
Navigating Bloomberg
Picture of the Bloomberg keyboard with brief descriptions of where certain keys are located.
Bloomberg has data on more than 5 million bonds, equities, commodities, currencies & funds. It covers most every publicly traded company in the world, and has profiles on more than a million people. To boot, it has a rather unusual keyboard...
< Red keys > -- used to login or logout of the system. You can only be logged into one terminal at a time.
Black keys -- used to enter tickers, function codes, search terms, date ranges, et cetera.
< Yellow market keys > -- used to tell Bloomberg in what market you want to look e.g. equities, commodities, etc.
< Green keys > -- used to make Bloomberg actually do something. You can type in the ticker for a security and hit the correct market key, but if you do not hit the green < GO > button Bloomberg will not do anything.
Typically when using Bloomberg, your command might look something like this: TICKER < MARKET > FUNCTION CODE < GO >
Search all of Bloomberg
The green < HELP > key is an extra special key on the Bloomberg keyboard. Use it to search the entire Bloomberg system. Simply type in your search terms and hit the <HELP>key.
When on an unfamiliar page, hit <HELP> once to see what help documentation Bloomberg has available on that page/function. Hit <MENU> to return to the former screen.
The Menu Key
The green < MENU > key is used to move up a level or to exit out of pop-up screens.
Information in the Bloomberg system is arranged hierachically and in order to move higher up in levels you can use the < MENU > key.
If you want to go back to a previous screen you viewed, use the arrows at the upper left corner of the screen. These arrows act more like the forward and back buttons in a web browser.
